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Maybe it would help to call it the Higgs recovery. After all, it took teams of physicists decades of arduous lab time and a $10 billion collider to pin down the elusive Higgs boson, a particle that may hold the secrets of the universe. So it doesn't beggar the imagination to believe that those same dedicated groups of scientists could find it child's play to uncover the hard truth as to whether or not this now-you-see-it, now-you-don't economic recovery actually exists.

We're tempted to drop a note to Peter Higgs after whom the boson was named urging him and his cohorts to turn their extraordinary talent of existential discovery to determining whether the recovery is a fact or a convenient artifice craftily designed by the powers that be to confuse and defuse the increasingly restive masses.

Protocol and a dollop of courtesy make us hesitant to direct that critical question to physicists instead of the practitioners of the far more dismal science of economics. Economists can be forgiven for not knowing a boson from a bison; it's not their bag. But you'd think they'd be able to offer a simple description of the current state of the economy. Well, you'd be wrong.

As Harry Truman memorably put it, he'd like just once to meet a one-armed economist who couldn't say on the one hand this and the other hand that. Economists are so prone to qualify every judgment that they've become models of irresolution. This propensity to hedge their opinions is no doubt why many of them are able to moonlight and reap handsome rewards for doing so, rendering advice to -- who else? -- hedge funds.

We readily grant that sizing up markets and economies, much less playing soothsayers to forecast what lies head for them, is an increasingly tough business. But if it were easy, why would anyone fork over big bucks to hear what economists have to say?

One wonders, on that score, if in these stringent times, economists are not vulnerable to what that legendary investor Gerald Loeb felt about the utility of stock analysts -- in a bull market you don't need them; in a bear market you don't want them.

However diligently reasoned their diagnosis and prognosis might be, their guesstimates can easily fall victim to the timidity of governments fearful of running afoul of the populace and the chicanery of banks voracious for profits (of which the revelations about fixing interest rates in London are merely the latest evidence).

Besides Friday's glum employment report and tepid readings for both the Institute of Supply Management's service sector and manufacturing indexes, noteworthy last week as gauges of the global economy were central-bank actions in Europe and China. The European Central Bank reduced its benchmark interest rate to 0.75%, the lowest in the 14 years it has been operating, but was disappointingly mum on any plans for future cuts. The Bank of England indulged in a bit of quantitative easing in the hopes of reviving Britain's moribund economy by buying a fresh load of government debt.

For its part, China unexpectedly took a swipe out of interest rates and made other easing moves for the second time in a month.

Beijing is nothing if not untrustworthy about figures that suggest everything is less than hunky-dory in its command economy. Hence an eminently logical assumption is that its urgent easing was designed to take the sting out of comparatively limp data for June, slated for release this week.

So where does this leave the global economy, including our own, and the markets tied to it? Well, Europe for the most part is sinking ever deeper into recession and threatening to drag many of the developing countries that depend on it for their exports with it. And much of the rest of the world has slowed to a shuffle or is teetering.

AS YOU MAY HAVE ALREADY GLEANED, the June employment numbers were bleak. The Establishment Survey came in more than a little light -- a measly 80,000 jobs were added, lowering the second- quarter average to 75,000 new slots, a big step down from the 226,000 average additions in the opening three months of this year. It was also far short of the invariably cockeyed consensus count, which was swollen to over 100,000 thanks to a last-minute rush occasioned by the usually vacuous rumors of a quantum leap upward in jobs.

The so-called Household Survey wasn't noticeably robust, either, with a 128,000 gain, a humongous drop from May's 422,000. The fairly unreliable birth/death computer model, which aims to snare the employees of firms too new to make the usual monthly tally, chipped in a not inconsiderable 124,000 jobs to the total. Chances are, not all of these turned out to be honest-to-goodness jobs.

Dave Rosenberg, the chief market and economy watcher for Gluskin Sheff, who is largely free of the sins of economists adumbrated in the opening paragraphs of this screed, points out that in the 36th month of an expansion, payrolls typically add something like 240,000 slots, or three times as many as this wobbly recovery added in June.

And while the average rebound from a recession since World War II usually took no longer than 25 months to recoup the lost jobs, this sluggish one is on target not to accomplish that until March 2015.

As much as anything, the moping pace of the current recovery reflects the fact that the last recession was indeed a "great" one. But as MacroMavens Stephanie Pomboy comments, the fourth month in a row of disappointing payrolls emphasizes the likelihood that seasonal factors and weather distortions have been sending out false signals about the economy's strength. Which fits in with her notion that in a deleveraging environment, "spurts of stronger data are the exception not the rule."

Stephanie also warns that "with the fiscal cliff drawing nearer by the day," the post-bubble reluctance by Corporate America to hire and expand isn't likely to change for the better anytime soon. That's what we like about Stephanie: You can always rely on her to see the bright side of things.

Back to Dave, who's a kindly soul but hardly a slouch in exploring the dark side of the Street and of the economy. He notes that not the least of the bad vibes from the employment report is the rise in how long folks have been on the dole. The length of involuntary idleness averaged 39.9 weeks in June, the most since February.

Moreover, people working part-time for economic reasons rose 112,000 on top of 426,000 the previous two months. This definitely has been a part-time rather than a normal recovery, also largely a residue of the shock administered to corporations by the financial crisis and all the bad things that issued from it.

Less than encouraging, too, is that U6, which encompasses the underemployed as well as the unemployed, inched up to 14.9% in June, the highest level since February.

One of the few redeeming features of a glum report, says Dave, is the rise in average weekly earnings to 0.5% from three months of nothing, weighing in at a hardly impressive 1.2% for the second quarter as a whole.

Aggregate hours worked, which Dave labels a "critical labor input into the supply-side derivation of GDP," averaged 0.4% in the second quarter, down from 4.3% in the prior quarter.

Unless productivity turns out to have bounced back in the April-June stretch, he cautions that the revised numbers for GDP growth could show an outright contraction, and with it a stepped-up level of recession talk.

For equity investors, they could do worse, he believes, than worry about the coming earnings season, especially since private-sector employers may have slashed their hiring rate sharply in the quarter recently ended. He reckons investors are in for a spate of disappointments. The only question is how much of it is already priced into stock prices.

Apparently, not a whole heck of a lot of it. The S&P 500 closed at a tad over 1354 on Friday. Which is still a heap closer to its 52-week high of 1419 than its low of 1099.

While there's widespread expectation that the Fed will come riding to the rescue with QE3 or some similar monetary gimmick perhaps as early as August, Dave is skeptical that it'll do the trick, spotting signs of diminishing returns from such stimulus not only here but in Europe and Asia as well.

What he recommends in the light of all the daunting prospects confronting the markets and the economy are high-quality noncyclicals with good cash flows and income generators if you can find them. Absolutely paramount in his book is preservation of cash.

As we read him, in other words, he's suggesting it's one of those times when return of investment takes precedence over return on investment.